ophidia
by starlineshine
Summary: In 1997, the war ends, and Marilyn Potter ends with it. In 1936, Marilyn Riddle has barely begun. [AU, fem!Harry, time travel, twin fic]
1. snake

inspired by and dedicated to ffnet user xxlilmusicxx. her story _Riddle Me This_ is so so so so good and acts hugely as my muse for this. when i first developed the huge urge to write fanfiction for her fanfiction—god it's so good—i asked her if this was okay and when she said yes i was SHAKEN and ofc very pleased so if you think this is good go read _Riddle Me This_ too! for this fic, the basics go like this: Marilyn Potter is the girl-who-lived and she loses the war and dies ): only she doesn't. thanks for reading!

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s _ **NA**_ k _e_

The war doesn't go the way she expects it to.

It isn't like Marilyn thought for sure she was going to win. That sounds both stupid and self-assured and she's never been either. It's a war that started decades ago, that started before her birth and burned angry even in the cold of the night her parents were killed. This war is larger than her. She never presumed herself important enough to end it. She always knew it was more complicated than that. Good and evil aren't black and white and the side of light doesn't always win and sometimes things don't work out and it all goes to shit and sometimes you fuck up.

Sometimes you lose. Sometimes, the war is louder and the enemy is angrier and sometimes, you lose.

Marilyn always knew that. She's no fool.

She never pretended to know what she's doing. Voldemort has had years to perfect his spellwork, and Marilyn can barely cast a head bludgeoning curse. She knew the odds were against her.

Still, with blood on her face and Neville's body pressed against her legs; with curses exploding mid-air and stone crumpling off the Hogwart's walls as though pulled; with the smell of something like a corpse brushing against her face and her bones cracked under her skin; with the air cloudy from dust and the ground itself shaking from the assault—still. She didn't think it would be like this. She can't think at all under the weight of her own failure and it _is_ her failure. The war is bigger than her but Dumbledore told her she was destined to defeat Voldemort. He told her he believed in her. He told her things that made her believe her best would be enough. He told her she could do it and she can't.

Voldemort is attacking magical Britain. He is winning. Marilyn is in the wreckage of Hogwarts, with the bodies of her friends littering the dirt. Her hair is sticky with blood. She runs a hand down her side, feels something sharp lodged into the skin there. Every move of her lungs brings a sharp sting. Her head hurts.

It's hilarious. Neville is dead against her, but her head hurts.

She can't think past the noises bouncing aerial across her skull. There's something in the distance, just beyond Hogwarts and its broken walls. It must be the army, she thinks distantly, rolling back around to ensure Hogwarts fell. Marilyn finds she cannot manage the will to move.

Luckily, it seems she doesn't have to. It only takes several minutes for Minerva to rip Marilyn's half-dead Girl-Who-Lived ass from the dirt. She can barely walk, and she stumbles against the professor's side. "McGonagall," she slurs, Neville's blood staining her bare legs. Her Hogwarts uniform—with the skirt and grey sweater vest and white dress shirt but it isn't white anymore—has never been practical for battle.

McGonagall is strangely beautiful in the dull lighting. She looks like a goddess, like the Roman goddess of wild, Diana. Her image is one easily consumed, burned into memory. There's blood on her face and a wisp of hair that's escaped from her bun. She looks pale and sallow and her eyes are made from stone. Marilyn can't see straight; one of her eyes has been blinded by either blood or a stray curse, and her balance is wrecked. But she has to keep this forever. Marilyn doesn't know what sticks after death but she wants to keep this forever.

This is her fault. She has to remember them.

"I'm sorry," Marilyn manages. They've been making their way across the dirty grass, stepping delicately over rubble and stray body parts. Marilyn faintly feels the urge to throw up, and McGonagall's arm around her is tight with tension. "That we didn't win."

Minerva's body shakes. "Be quiet," she orders lowly, harsh. "We haven't lost yet."

Marilyn stumbles across stone—a staircase, edging downward into darkness. Marilyn squints. Runes glow along the walls, but she can't find it in herself to decipher them. There's a hand against her back. She no longer remembers who it belongs to.

Her name is Marilyn Lily Potter. She knows this the way she knows her own skin—the way she knows the feeling of her magic itching against her bones.

She is so tired. She's so tired. Marilyn's feet trip over themselves and she topples into cold stone, cheek pressed to it and her legs unable to support her. Someone maneuvers her to her back, her limbs spread out over what seems to be a table, her head lolling and her hair sticky on her face. It feels she has spent so, so long trying to survive. There have been so many obstacles, so much to force her way through. It has been so difficult to live. She can't remember what she was doing it for. The table is so hard; her back aches. She stretches her hands out, curls her nails into the surface. Not metal—not an operating table. Not wood—not a dinner table.

 _No,_ Marilyn realizes. _Not a table. An altar._

She is too exhausted to be afraid.

"If the ritual succeeds," someone murmurs, "then you can save us yet."

That always seems to be Marilyn's job, always seems to be her responsibility. Haven't they realized she can't do it? Isn't it obvious she can't do it? Don't they know she could never do it? She's failed. It's over. She can't save them.

"I need you to think about Voldemort," a different voice tells her. _Don't say his name._ There's some kind of scratching noise—she can't place it. It's a tiny grating static growing louder. "I need you to say his name." The scratching intensifies, gets even louder, and still she can't place it. A radio, maybe, or her own nails scraping against the stone she's supine against.

 _Don't say his name._

Scratch scratch scratch. It's rhythmic.

 _No,_ Marilyn realizes. _Not a scratching. A hissing._

There is a snake in the room.

"Marilyn, _please_. I need you to say his name," someone urges. The hissing is closer to her, with a backdrop of something outside crumpling. The world is falling apart around her and a snake continues to hiss. She can hear it, now, can understand the words and they float over her, gather under her eyelids. Marilyn can feel the letters smudging on her skin. She would hold them in her hands if only she could move.

" _Voldemort,"_ the snake is hissing. _"Voldemort, Marilyn. His name is Voldemort. Say it!"_

"Tom Riddle," Marilyn rasps. _Don't say his name!_ His face flashes across her and she can't think and he could very well be in the room, too, hands on her the same way he had touched her in the chamber, when his fingers were just corporal enough to close around her throat. The snake's hisses turn into something closer to a howl and there are more hisses blurring over her ears, now, and she can't breathe.

The hissing is a chorus. Scales drool over her legs—snakes are everywhere.

"Good enough," she hears. It's a voice she can't place; she imagines for a moment it would be rather difficult to manage it when she is lying flat on an altar but then she remembers she _is_ lying flat on an altar. "Goodbye, Marilyn," they say. She can't think past the ringing buzzing against her ears. There are spells and curses being shouted in the distance, crashes of rubble just loud enough to catch on the edge of her mind.

"Don't leave me," Marilyn manages to get out. _Please, please, please don't leave me please please please don't leave me!_ She can imagine her body, cold and rotting, alone in this chamber. It makes her remember the chamber of secrets, of bleeding and barely breathing and feeling so, so certain of her own death, alone and lost and never found and it makes her think of the nights alone locked in her cupboard, hungry and blind and sniffling in the blackness, choked by the quiet and she can't do it. The thought sends panic reeling down her spine. She can't imagine dying here with nothing but her own pained breath to keep her company. She takes in another, throat stinging from the force of her inhale. It is too dark to see. Is she going to die here?

Maybe she already has.

"You'll see me again," someone says. Minerva? Or is it Padma? Granger?

It occurs to Marilyn abruptly that she's no idea if Granger, if Padma? If they are alive or dead. The thought curls up in her chest, scraping against her heart. Everyone is dead or maybe they aren't yet but they will be soon. The weight of this presses against her, her head pounding. Everyone's dead or dying and it's her fault. Everything's over and it's _her fault_.

It's all her fault and she knows it—she thinks of her cupboard and she thinks of Aunt Petunia and _you're worthless you're nothing_ and it's all her fault. "I'm sorry," she says again, the word a curse, slurred from her lazy mouth, her lips refusing her commands. She feels her own fingers twitch. "I couldn't beat him. 'm sorry. I'm so sorry—" Marilyn finds she can't tell if it's guilt or shame of if she means it and blood bubbles out of her mouth and there's something warm spilling over her cheeks but she doesn't know if it's tears.

"Don't be," someone tells her. "You'll beat him now."

The year is 1997. A breath creeps into Marilyn Potter's throat with the ease of a snake, and there is a hand on her forehead, brushing back her hair. _"Voldemort,"_ the chorus of serpents say. Pythons corn snakes vipers—she wishes she knew because she can feel one curling around her arm. _"Say it!"_

Something explodes above her. Marilyn's eyes slither open, just barely, to see destruction, before something living slides over her face, the texture of its skin and the bony plates all over it—

There's a sound, a sort of pop, and the world is gone.

…

Marilyn wakes to silence. It's unclear to her if the entire world has been destroyed or if she is dead or perhaps worse. There's something in the air layering over her face, like dark bands wrapping around her, but when she breathes they are shaken from her throat. She is soon enough capable of sight and her forehead's dry of smeared blood.

" _Be silent,"_ someone says. The command has fear rising in her. Marilyn can't breathe through the feeling starting to build in her chest. It's like she's waking up in a body that doesn't belong to her. " _Be still."_ There's a noise like a hiss crawling along Marilyn's ears, sneaking up her spine like the chills creeping over her skin. " _Be silent, child. Be still."_

She's never been good with directions.

Her entire body seems to wake at once, shaking as it rises. Her chest trembles under the pressure of her breaths, and her eyes are wild as they scan the room. It's all blank, dirty walls, with cracks and spiderwebs lining the corners. There is one window. It's got bars crossed over the clouded glass.

Marilyn breathes. " _Child, be still!"_

She's on a stiff cot, with a metal frame and a single blanket pushed to the backboard. Marilyn twists, bare feet touching to the cold concrete floor. She stares at the matching cot leaned against the opposing wall, at the dark haired boy laying on his side in it, facing away from her. The cot—it is barely a foot away.

The room is smaller than some prison cells.

The entire world is separated from her by a thin sheen of what could have been glass. Marilyn's toes are numb against the floor. The world feels unreal; her body itself alien. The difference, somehow, the change, is palpable, and her eyes scan desperately for the voice.

There's a snake peeking out at her from under the adjacent cot. " _Be still,"_ it hisses as she watches. Marilyn feels achingly disturbed.

"Where is this?"

The boy's shoulders shift under his thin shirt. He can't be more than ten. "What?" His voice—it's whispery. Pale. Mere decibels from a hiss. "Marilyn, what are you talking about?" The sun is barely rising, leaving the light washed grey. He turns over, twisting on the cot, and his face—

"What year is it?" her own voice asks. It isn't her speaking she knows it isn't because she has swallowed her own tongue. The boy is still looking at her.

Marilyn's breath is caught. She's looking at Tom Riddle.

The youngest she's ever seen him was sixteen and this boy is far, far younger, but he's unmistakable. His cheekbones are angular and his eyes are dark and his hair is darker and _glossy,_ too, even in the flat light. It's Tom Riddle. She can tell by his spidery fingers, by the slightly sick curl to his mouth.

She's siting fully upright in an instant, her back painfully straight, afraid to take her eyes off him but desperate to search the room because she needs her wand—she needs a knife, a letter opener, an icicle—a heavy _book_ , for god's sake—where is her _wand—_

"Marilyn, dear sister," Tom Riddle says, voice pitched low from sleep. "It's 1936."

 _Sister._

She can't stop the sharp inhale, her hands clenching into fists around the rough, thin sheet covering the mattress under her. Her body becomes a string pulled wildly tight with tension. Her heart is beating so, so loudly. _The year is 1997…_ Everything rushes out of her in a thick breath.

"Oh," she says faintly. "I see."

She pushes the tips of her toes more firmly against the ground, stretches her feet over the side of the cot. They barely touch the cool concrete floor. She stands, stiffly, her legs weak and her knees threatening to buckle. She's in a nightgown, and when she looks to Tom, he's wiggled from under his bedding and revealed equally shabby sleeping clothes. Her shoulders feel trapped under the fabric.

"Are you alright?"

Tom's staring at her, eyes glazed with concern. It's like someone has painted a layer over him, like someone has brushed a veneer over him and left his eyes enameled with something kind. No, that's wrong. It's not kind. It's more obsessive than that. It's more like adoration, glorification. He looks like he wants to reach out and touch her, like he wants to pull her towards him and offer comfort the way some people would offer tribute to their gods.

Marilyn suppresses a shiver. Her fingers still tremble.

"I'm fine," she says.

"You're up early," Tom notes, slipping from his bed as though shedding a skin. "Mrs. Cole hasn't woken us yet. No one else, either, I'll bet. The old bat probably isn't awake herself." He smiles, like this is a joke they've shared often. Marilyn's stare is blank; Tom's face loses its cheer.

His voice isn't the same as she remembers it. Still intelligent, sure—but with a distinct slip of street dialect, of something unpolished, and a hint to it that betrays his age. His eyes are bright with something frightening.

"Did you have a nightmare?" Tom's starting towards her, now, and the room is so small and he crosses it so quickly, before she has a chance to recoil. His hand rises, and even as Marilyn closes her eyes against the image, cold fingers brush her face.

Tom Riddle holds a strand of her hair between his index finger and his thumb. She forces her eyes open, and finds him entirely too close. His eyes are holding hers as though there's a steel wire strung between them.

Tom Marvelo Riddle. Murderer and conqueror. His nose, less than an inch from hers.

Marilyn can't breathe.

"Were you awake long?" His eyes are soft. His fingers run through her hair, thumb going up and down over the top of her hairline. It feels somewhat intimate, and he's Tom Riddle, and Marilyn wants to throw up. "You should've woken me—"

"I'm fine," Marilyn announces abruptly, stepping back and nearly tripping over the edge of her cot. The metal bed frame feels cold against the backs of her calves and the juxtaposition of it compared to the sharp flush spread over her cheeks makes Marilyn want to scream. Tom's fingers are still midair, reaching for her, and hurt inches over his face. "I'm fine," Marilyn says again.

She steps carefully around him, avoiding even a brush against his side. Her hand has closed on the metal doorknob when Tom's hand catches her wrist.

"Marilyn," he murmurs, "what's wrong?"

 _You,_ she wants to scream. _You, touching me. Don't touch me. Don't. Let me go let me go let me go—_

"Nothing," she says, wrist pulling from his grip. She opens the door just as a whistle sounds from down the hall, and there are so many doors, all with badly chipped brown paint. Looking at them makes her dizzy. The hallway must have an end but as she looks down it, it seems to stretch, pulling backwards as though it goes on forever. Marilyn's heart beats even louder. An older woman of average build, hair up in a tight bun, seems to be the whistler in question; the whistle is still held in her mouth, and Marilyn watches her spit it out, watches the whistle catch on the string threaded around the woman's throat. The woman looks at Marilyn like she's being forced to examine roadkill.

"Dress yourself, Miss Riddle," the woman says, the corners of her mouth tilted down a bit in disapproval or disgust or both. She raises the whistle up again, blows it. Marilyn recoils, falling back into the room.

"Listen to Mrs. Cole. We have to get dressed." Tom catches her arm, spinning her around to face him. His face is cautious, now, and there's worry under his blank features. "Okay?"

The questions in his eyes will never rest.

Marilyn has no intention of answering to Tom fucking Riddle.

"Go change, then," Marilyn hisses, extracting herself from him the way one would remove a tick. She steps back into the hallway, and Tom's staring at her like she's slapped him. "Get on with it," she says, panic biting at her throat. He still doesn't move. He reaches towards her, but she pulls the door closed.

In the thirty seconds or so that Marilyn's stranded in the cold hallway, a tiny blond girl wiggles past. When she sees Marilyn, she jerks back, pressing herself against the opposite wall. The blond girl looks over her shoulder several times as she scrambles down the hall. Marilyn watches her tiny pale head grow smaller and smaller and smaller until it vanishes around a corner somewhere in the distance of the never-ending hallway. No one has ever acted that way around her before. It almost looked like…fear. It leaves a sour feeling in Marilyn's mouth.

She taps her knuckles against the door. "I'm not going to wait forever, Tom."

It opens. Tom removes himself. He looks demoralized in the face of her unrest, and the collar of his pale shirt is ruffled under the grey sweater vest.

"All yours, sister," he says. He sounds empty and strange and Marilyn hates him.

There ends up being an adventure of grey uniforms in a storage bin under her cot. Marilyn takes it upon herself to pull one over her body. Her skin is pale and clean; her old scars are gone. It feels like something's been taken from her.

The scar on her knee, from where she tripped on the marble church steps in the rain; the scar going up the inside of her elbow, from her first Quidditch match; the scar lacing along her stomach, from the first time meeting Tom Riddle in the Chamber of Secrets. They're gone. It was her identity. This pale skin means nothing. She leans in close, looks for the mole on the corner of her lip. There isn't one. There is no mole.

Her old hair, smooth and light and pin-straight, is now a thick dark brown, wavy and unhappy. It sears down her shoulders to her lower back like a burn. Her freckles are gone, as well as the scar inked on her forehead. She lifts her shirt a bit, looks down at her protruding hipbones and the unforgiving straight line of her young figure. Her skin feels unfamiliar where it is stretched tight over her bones.

Marilyn Potter is dead, after all.

Marilyn Riddle, alive, walks quietly behind her brother to a long lunch table. She sits with Tom at her right and children all around. It was frightening at first, to see so many skeletal faces with skin pulled too tight and limbs awkwardly thin. But it is 1936. World War II is crawling awake, and Tom Riddle lives in an orphanage. She does, too, now. It's a gloomy place. Dull. Distinctly muggle. Even non-magical places can have sparks of color, but the orphanage is a dead zone.

Marilyn spares— _Tom_ a glance. He's slowly eating the grey porridge spooned to the bowls in front of them. Marilyn can't bring herself to touch it; Hogwarts has spoiled her. Seven years of delicious food has left her wrinkling her nose. This was particularly problematic over her summers. Petunia Dursley was not a good cook.

She stops. Thinks on that. Petunia Dursley _will not be_ a good cook? She stops again. Thinks harder. Petunia Dursley might not _be_ at all. Nothing she remembers is real. It might never be real. None of it. None of them.

"Tom." He jerks in his haste to provide her with his attention. _Be silent,_ someone had said. "Were you speaking to me? Before I woke up?"

His head tilts to the side, just a hint. It's a strange gesture. She guesses it's meant to silently articulate how strange of a question she has asked. "No," he says. He doesn't ask her why. The way he's looking at her has a smear of something expectant. It's like he believes an explanation is inherent.

 _Be silent… Be still._

"I thought I heard something," she says airily. It is the only explanation he will be receiving from her. She turns from him pointedly, and for a second it's complete silence. Then—

Tom slams his spoon to the table, leaving porridge to splash messily in its bowl. "What's wrong with you?" he growls, turning to her with eyes wide and hands splayed toward her in some sort of angry surrender. He's ten years old, maybe less than that, scrawny, and he terrifies her. "Have I done something to you?"

Marilyn tries to swallow down the lump in her throat. "I haven't the faintest idea what you—"

"Oh, stuff it." He grabs her shoulders and forces her closer to him. She looks at his nose. She can't handle looking at his eyes. It would be too close. "First you're so bloody strange when you wake up, and then you boot me out into the _hallway_ while you change, and then you can't walk within a _foot_ of me and you haven't even _touched_ your breakfast—"

He grows more expressive as this continues, with his hands going into the air and the air around her thick with tension and on the table, her porridge begins to boil. He's ten. She shivers from the cold air. When was Voldemort born? He's somewhere around ten, and he's Tom Riddle, and he gets _louder_ —

Oh dear.

His face suddenly crumples, words dying on his mouth. It occurs to Marilyn that there are tears going down her face. "Marilyn—"

She recoils from his touch when he reaches for her but Tom doesn't stop. He brings her against him, with her tear stained face pressing into his shoulder and one of his hands burying itself in the hair splashing down her back. She can't breathe over the smell of him, and he won't stop touching her and he won't stop speaking, won't stop murmuring soft condolences against the top of her head.

It's disgusting. It's repulsive. She can't stop crying.

The dead bodies flash in her brain and the image of Voldemort's inhuman features make sparks under her eyelids with every blink. The hand in her hair continues to play with it and another hand manages to slip around her shoulders. His touch blights her. "It's okay," he murmurs, lips moving against the hair along the top of her head. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry—don't cry, Marilyn."

Marilyn pushes weakly at his shoulders, tired from the effort of it. She can't think over the sound of her own thoughts, can't feel anything around the palace of screams he built in her head. Her heartbeat gets even louder. "Don't touch me," she manages. She's crying in the arms of a monster surrounded by children she's never met and it's painful and he's still _touching_ her.

"I hate to see my sister cry," Tom whispers and it's sick. She isn't his sister and she doesn't want his comfort or his pity. She wants him dead. Her hands twitch with the urge to strangle him, to rip his limbs out of their joints and peel his skin off his body, to leave him a raw pile of blood and muscle.

She abruptly finds she hates him. His skin is against her skin and he's still talking into her hair and she _hates_ him. Tom Riddle is a killer. He deserves to die.

 _Not yet._ He's a child. He's killed no one. _He doesn't deserve to die yet._ Marilyn listens to him breathe. Her world is gone but some things are supposed to happen and someone as sick as Tom Riddle can't be circumstantial. _He doesn't deserve to die yet,_ she thinks again, stronger now, one hand tightening around his shoulder while the other grips the back of his shirt. _But he will._ He'll eventually have to.

 _And when the time comes,_ Marilyn thinks, forcing herself to memorize the feel of his fingers on her skin, _I'll kill him._


	2. sister

**S** iS **t** _ **E**_ _r_

The orphanage, as it turns out, is incredibly unpleasant with or without Tom. She tried, at first, to avoid him, quietly. She'd sit down at a different table, next to different skeletal children. They looked at her like she's something decaying. They looked at her like she's something terrifying or terrible or both. Tom would stare at her across the lunchroom, eyes cold and soup untouched, watching as she quietly bit at her piece of stale bread. Alone, the orphanage began to feel something like a body, and she the ghost within it.

Marilyn's seen enough ghosts. She and Tom both knew they were haunted, but she wouldn't be her own phantom, and so she relents. She crawls back to the room they share and when he looks at her from his side, separated by less than a foot, they both know she gives. He wins.

Now, Marilyn sits up, tailbone aching against the stiff mattress. Looks at his cot, maybe a foot away from hers. Tom's still curled into himself, facing the wall. Sometimes when he looks like that she feels bad for him. The pity rolls easily into disdain and then she's just looking at him, her mind on a coil, shaking between an uncomfortable disquieted urge to comfort and an equally discomforting desire to watch him hurt. The way he looks at her—it's something like betrayal but not so strong. It's as though he's disappointed. Like he's watching her go through a phase.

He's going to be unimpressed when he realizes she'll be disgusted by him forever.

(The worse thing, really, is she doesn't know if it's disgust at all. He's a child and she's so, so afraid of him.)

He seems to be universally disliked, which would be a nice surprise, if the same weren't true of Marilyn. Mrs. Cole, the older woman Marilyn'd seen, looks at her like she's the devil, and the other children stare as though they've been brought to a murder scene. Whoever Marilyn Riddle was before Marilyn Potter became her, she certainly was no saint.

This place is fighting to rival the Dursley home. Marilyn hates it here. At least they were her family. There's something in that, for her. There's something in blood. There has to be. She has to believe there is and that's why she was destined to defeat Voldemort and that's why her mother died for her and even though there wasn't love between Marilyn and the Dursley family, between her and Petunia there was blood. That has to have meant something.

It doesn't matter now.

Her only family here is apparently Voldemort himself. She slips from her bed, crawls the two steps to his and lingers there, the cold concrete floor waging a quiet war against her knees. He looks normal. She imagines if she shook him, his eyes would be blurry from sleep, his form vulnerable and pliable. His dark hair is a bit messy—he needs to wash it, she thinks—and his shoulder blades seem too prominent through his nightshirt—he needs to eat, she thinks, but then she remembers everyone in the orphanage needs to eat. She reaches out a hand to touch him, cautious and slow, the moment a monument. The act feels dangerous. Her heart is beating so loudly across her body, pounding in her ears and pulsing against her skin over her wrists. Marilyn watches her own hand stretch towards him as if in a dream.

He rolls over, eyes open, very awake, watching her now. She freezes. _Caught._

Marilyn swallows down a gasping breath and as she snatches her hand back, he takes it in his, linking their fingers together. All she'd wanted was to feel his hair or the bones she knows are pushing against his skin the same way hers do. Now, he rubs his thumb over her hand. "Good morning," she whispers. She says it for something to say, something to do with her heavy tongue.

"How long were you going to stare at me?" Tom asks. He seems genuinely curious, tone unbothered. "You haven't done that in a while. I thought maybe you had a nightmare, but I—"

He breaks off. It's the first time he's seemed awkward to her. Marilyn remembers when she first saw him, the morning a few weeks ago, when the cold of September had still seemed like the ice of being dead and the dark in his eyes had never seemed more frightening. The pang of guilt—it surprises her. She has nothing to feel guilty for. He has no right to touch her, no right to pull her to him, no right to _her._ He has no right.

The guilt remains. Voldemort had no right to touch Marilyn Potter, but maybe Tom Riddle has one to his sister.

"I'm…" The urge to apologize lingers on the edge of her mouth. She can't bring herself to let it escape. "I didn't have a nightmare," she says instead. Marilyn rarely has dreams of note, now. The images her mind creates are neither good nor bad, instead just a muddle of confusing scenery and lacerated colors. "I didn't mean to wake you."

The act of conversing with him itches at her. It digs into her skin and takes root there, parasitical. Like a weed.

He looks at her. His eyes scan up and down, cataloging. Marilyn forces her hand not to stiffen. Tom sits up, so he has to tilt his head down a bit to see her. He pulls her closer by her fingers, bringing their interlocked hands from their spot dangling over his cot to the space between his thigh and the pillow. His thumb keeps making tiny circles on the back of her hand. She hates that it has begun to feel comforting. Staring up at him like this makes her feel like she's praying. She can think of no falser god than Tom. "I love you," he announces to her abruptly.

She bites her tongue so hard she tastes blood, her free hand digging crescents into her palm so harshly her nails grow wet. Only the pain keeps her from recoiling. Her hand still spasms in his. "I love you, too," she manages to get out.

His face twists in concern and she hates that, hates that she can make his face do things like that, hates that she has to tell him she loves him and even then it is still the wrong answer. He drops to the floor beside her. She turns automatically to face him and their knees touch. She hates the rush of thought through her, the way she worries if he's bruised himself. His free hand comes up to her face. She wants to reach up to touch it, to feel his fingers on both sides instead of just the calluses that press to her cheek, but that'd be strange and off and she doesn't know why she wanted to do it anyway so she doesn't. "Marilyn," he says. It sounds chiding. Scolding. Like she's been misbehaving. "What's wrong?"

Yes, Marilyn, what's wrong? What's wrong, Riddle? It's 1936 and none of the days in the orphanage have been worse than normal and your brother loves you. Marilyn, what's wrong? She wants suddenly to know exactly what Marilyn Riddle would have said. It's perverse, self-centered. She wants to know everything about Marilyn Riddle, wants to know if she parted her hair on the left or the right, if she were any good at chess. When everything that made Marilyn Potter vanished—the scars, the moles, the freckles—things belonging to someone else appeared in their place. Who was this girl? Who was this girl, with her wavy hair and pale skin? Where did she get the bruises on the back of her calf or the tiny, plush scar at the base of her spine? Marilyn Riddle, she likes to think when she's standing in front of the mirror. She can spend hours pouring over each inch of skin, each movement of her pupils, each thread of the iris. Sometimes Marilyn does it more than once a day.

The girl in the reflection isn't right. She's backwards or too sharp or too angular or too bright. Marilyn can't help it, though. She has to look. She has to judge her. She has to decide if she's worth the skin she's been sewn into. Who is Marilyn Riddle? She wants to know. She wants to _know._ Marilyn _needs_ to _know._

Another part of her is terrified of the prospect.

The selfish part wins.

"Am I a bad person?" she demands, words bubbling free. Other questions rage against her: _what's my favorite color_ _how often is my hair put up_ _do we play board games do I play with my hair am I doing my best am I doing my best am I doing my best—_

"No," he says instantly. There isn't a hint of hesitation. He says it like fact. A simple truth. He smiles at her a little and it's been weeks without anyone and she's so, so alone and he's all she has and she's so, so weak. He said it like she'd been asking a trivia question and not something unknowable about her darkening heart. Tom said it like he didn't just believe it but knew it.

It's the same way, when Voldemort had been cutting her open for sacrifice during her fourth year, she might have said, "I'm bleeding."

"Okay," she says.

"Does this mean you aren't angry with me anymore?" he asks. Even when he's looking at her like she's holy he still acts like a beaten dog, waiting for another hit to come. The rush of pity and guilt overtakes her again.

She remembers growing up without parents, remembers the war, remembers the certainty she'd had that she was going to die, and she's angry again.

Mrs. Cole's whistle begins to sound. "We should dress," Marilyn says to avoid the question. She hastily pulls away, tugs the bin of uniforms from under her bed. She only remembers she never kicked Tom out after she's done, and has already finished pulling her sweater over her head and her skirt up her legs.

When she turns to look at him, he's adjusting his shirt. She was right. His ribs are as visible as hers.

…

This place isn't all bad, of course. Few things are. The older children have no time for the Riddles and the younger children are often too afraid to bother them, which leaves Marilyn with some space. Space, for her, is frequently a synonym for loneliness. No one will talk to her. Barely anyone looks at her. It reminds her of grade school, of being at the back of the classroom in shirts three sizes too large and with hair desperately tangled. Here, at least, none of the other children are actively cruel to her. The matrons, though, don't have the same reservations, and in just the few weeks it has been, Marilyn's already learned through experience that corporal punishment was all the rage in the 1930s. The food is horrible and the authority figures are nasty and no one will _talk_ to her. She steps out into the courtyard, smiles at a girl named Amy if only to prove her point; Amy flees. This place isn't all bad. It isn't great. For her—and Tom, too—the only fighting back occurs in the form of magic.

Not to say there is much fighting. It's quiet, accidental magic. Marilyn used to set Petunia's shirtsleeves aflame during particularly bad nights at the Dursley house; now, she watches Tom howl until the wind meets his call.

If they're loud enough, if they're angry enough, the world will answer, and she hates it. The other children scatter out of her path and the earth shakes if she thinks for too long about Tom, if she gets too angry, and she hates it. Tom's shouting, the clouds are darkening, and Marilyn follows his voice.

Accidental magic. It's almost misleading. The magic itself is completely intentional; the result, though, unpredictable and purely based on luck, gave it the name. The varying endgame of accidental magic makes it useless and dangerous in equal parts, Marilyn thinks, watching Tom from across the grass. He's talking at a little blond girl, Abigail. He gestures wildly towards her, and then the paperback clutched in her tiny hands abruptly catches flame. Marilyn watches with interest as she flings the novel away from herself. It lands heavy on the grass, inches from Marilyn's feet, and Tom looks on the edge of seething. Abigail is a reasonable girl and not one to throw away good paper in the same way Tom is generally not the type to set books aflame.

Marilyn squints at the burnt cover page. _Rebecca_ , by Daphne du Maurier. Not an awful read. Quite good, actually, in her opinion; there was a copy of it in their room and Tom kept it under her bed—

Ah. This is the same copy usually under the bed. The book is stolen. Marilyn realizes this now, watching Tom's clenched fists. Abigail's mouth drops in what would have become a scream if she could get enough breath for it. "You're a _thief,_ " Tom hisses, fists clenched, and Marilyn takes the opportunity to quietly stomp out the flaming book. It might still be worth something, if more than half the words survived. "That was mine and you _knew_ it!"

Abigail is illiterate. Tom knows this. The novel in question is certainly not to Tom's taste, either. There is little reason for anger on his behalf. It was Marilyn's book, anyway.

But it doesn't take much for Tom. All he'd had to do was see the book held in Abigail's tiny hands—that was enough for the crisp print to set itself to burn. He's so temperamental. It's early January of 1937, now, and the year hangs over their necks like the axe of an executioner. It was September of 1936 when Marilyn first arrived, and she knows their Hogwarts letters are arriving soon. Their tenth birthday—Tom had to remind her; she didn't know he was born in December until the month arrived and nearly ended and he was wishing her a happy birthday—passed so quickly, and so quietly.

 _No one here likes us,_ Tom had said, late on December 31. He'd pilfered some chocolate earlier that week when they'd escaped out the back gate. Crawling over the fence after had been hell. Marilyn refuses to accept his hand when he made it over first. _But I don't mind. I don't need them._ He'd offered her another piece of chocolate and a secretive almost-grin. Marilyn's never seen Tom grin. _I have you._ He's right. Without Tom, Marilyn would have nothing. No friends, no family, no kindness. Tom isn't exactly kind, but the orphanage will never do anything for her, for them. Its resources seem to be limited to disgusting meals, uncomfortable living quarters, and anger. Marilyn wishes he would just shut up about it.

Abigail's lower lip begins to tremble. Her fingertips are red with small burn welts. Looking at her has something rising in Marilyn's chest. "I—I—"

"Oh, leave her alone, would you? It's just a silly book." Tom's anger stops, hit by a train. Marilyn walks towards them, forcing her expression unimpressed, with the burnt book under one arm. She puts a hand to Tom's arm, and he stiffens under her touch. It takes only a moment, though, for him to reach for her, and Marilyn allows him to slip his hand in hers. It seems to be a nervous habit of his.

It is absolutely disgusting.

"I'm sure she meant very little by it," Marilyn murmurs, quietly, like it's a secret. Tom loves secrets. Her eyes sharpen, going to Abigail. Then, louder, in a way that makes it seem like she's on Tom's side, "Don't steal from us again."

The poor little girl is shaking in a fashion implying an earthquake. It makes guilt swarm inside Marilyn's stomach, makes her belly writhe, as though something were slithering around inside it. It feels uncomfortable and sickly, and the sea of orphans in the courtyard—Amy and Dennis and Tabitha—are looking at her as though she were molded from lava. All of them, here, are so easily shaken and it's awful because they're just children and Britain will soon be at war but Marilyn can't fix it. Amy's eyes are wild with fear and Paul looks like he is going to vomit and Janet has tears in her eyes and Abigail is _shaking_.

These children are terrified of them, terrified of Tom. Marilyn turns her back on them, long dark hair flicking over her shoulder, and Tom is still holding her hand as they slip from the schoolyard, yellow grass crunching beneath her feet.

"You shouldn't have stopped me," Tom says, pointedly looking directly in front of him and avoiding her eyes. His grip on her betrays the lack of real irritation. "She stole that from us." _Us._ How quaint. _Rebecca_ plays to only Marilyn's interests.

Ah. He's upset because he thinks the anger was on her behalf. He wanted a thank-you. He wanted her to call him a hero, to clutch _Rebecca_ as though it were gold. He wanted her to be pleased, grateful.

 _Not bloody likely._

"Abigail's a little girl, Tom."

"I know that, Marilyn—"

"Would you do that to me if _I_ stole from you?"

His words tumble away, his face scrunching, like she's said something ridiculous. She likes to ask questions like this, to push him, see how far his you-and-me-against-the-world attitude can stretch. Him and her against the world, for now, sure, but she knows it won't last. Sometimes when she looks at him he's a boy and he's scared and sad and lonely and other times he isn't a person at all. Marilyn wonders what he would have done without her to intervene. The orphanage can be traumatizing, but not so much so that he has any real reason for wanting to beat a little girl's face. _That was quite rude of you,_ Marilyn thinks, feeling Tom's thumb rub against the edge of her palm. _But you don't deserve to die just yet._

"You would never steal from me," he decides on. It's the safe answer. It isn't what she wants.

"If I did," Marilyn repeats, "would you get like that?"

"Of course not," Tom says, then, indignant and appalled. "You're my sister."

He's just a ten year old boy, the same Abigail is just a little girl. If she can stop Tom from ripping Abby a new one, she can stop him from hurting anyone, maybe everyone, and she might even be able to stop herself from hurting him. Isn't that why she's here, though? Wasn't she meant to slip herself into his life and quietly slit his neck? Avoid the war, avoid the death? Be a preemptive strike?

 _Sister._

A young boy's hand is warm in hers. She isn't ready to make it cold with death.

…

A part of Marilyn wants to avoid connecting with Tom as much as possible. He kills her parents and her friends and destroys her home and spits on the graves of her grandparents and he wants to take over the world. He wants things too strongly and eventually he'll decide he wants everything. She can't stop that.

There is very little to like.

But she's so, so weak, and so alone. The orphanage isn't full of friendly faces. Sometimes the way Tom looks at her scares her. Sometimes the way he tells her those things, things like, _I don't need them. I have you._ Sometimes it scares her. He can't do anything to her now, so for now, she isn't his possession. Marilyn doesn't belong to anyone. If anything, Tom belongs to her. His life is in her hands. She can kill him anytime she wants. She's done it before. He doesn't scare her.

( _oh, but he does, so terribly, terribly_ )

But later, if he wanted to, he could change that.

Marilyn's never had siblings. She always thought Padma and Granger were close enough. _Brother,_ she thinks. She's so, so weak, and so alone, and Tom calls her sister. Marilyn shifts in her cot, her back whining from the motion, and turns on her side. Tom's already sleeping, body curled in on itself and facing her, his features gentle in the dark light. He looks younger at night. More delicate. It almost makes her feel motherly, almost inspires her to care for him. It's nearly enough to make him look like a little boy.

He _is_ a little boy. She knows that. He's a little boy in an orphanage with nothing but her to hold on to. He looks soft and small, curled up in his cold cot, and a part of Marilyn suddenly stings, _aches_ with the urge to brush the hair back from his face, with the urge to kiss his forehead and hold his hand.

He hisses something in his sleep. A chill passes over Marilyn, and the moment is lost.

Tom hisses again, a bit louder. She can't work out the words. There's a snake somewhere in their room, Marilyn knows. It speaks to her, sometimes, in the early morning, when the sun hasn't fully risen and the light is clouded as it spills across her face. The snakes seem to feel something for her. She can feel it, too. Her last memory—her last confusing, strange memory—is of being surrounded by them, of feeling them touching her everywhere and hearing their song. When she and Tom leave the orphanage, snakes sometimes follow after them. Marilyn's woken up before with unknown serpents curled around her ankles. Her body always goes tense, skin crawling, and when they look up, realize they've been caught, they slide away quickly.

Marilyn Riddle can speak to snakes. Marilyn Potter could do that, too. She never found out why. It isn't in the Potter family line, and Lily was a muggleborn. She shouldn't have been able to, but she could. Even though she knows Marilyn Potter could do it, too, it still feels disgusting. It's another link to Tom. She and him both talk to snakes. The snake living with them—Tom's snake, probably—has never revealed itself to her, but Marilyn hears it now, as Tom's face tightens and he hisses something again. " _I hunger for something,"_ it scratches out. The hissing sounds like it's coming from under her cot. " _Perhaps the same is true for him?"_

Tom hungers for everything.

She slips from her bed, holding her pillow with her. " _Perhaps,"_ Marilyn allows, the noise unfamiliar on her lips. It makes her feel sickly. She thinks of the way Voldemort looked when he spoke it, thinks of the veins protruding from his white skin. The snake makes a small noise as though to agree with her, and bile rises, unbidden, in Marilyn's throat. She swallows it. She's crept to his cot, the pillow clutched in one hand and her eyes already flashing with the image of his dead body.

Tom's mouth twists in what could have been pain, a small noise escaping his mouth. Marilyn can feel her hand shaking around her pillow. The energy drains from her, and she crawls back into her cot and turns over and goes to sleep.

…

She wonders if Tom is truly sick or if something made him that way. He seems—not normal, exactly. He could never seem normal to her. But he seems alright. Sane. Okay. She watches him while he watches the water. Wool's Orphanage has taken a trip to the Serpentine. It was originally going to be the sea, Mrs. Cole said. But that was too far. And this is a pretty lake, she'd said. Marilyn's never seen it before. She hadn't traveled much. The Serpentine is a pretty lake, she thinks.

"It's pretty," Marilyn notes, saying as much to Tom. Most of the other orphans are playing in the sand. The light feels grey to her. It's darkened, cloudy, the sun stuffed behind the sky. The water rises and falls, the blue so dark and cold it feels grey, too.

"It smells like mildew," Tom says.

She sits down in the sand, tucking her skirt under her butt. "That's true," she admits, pulling her knees to her chest. The wind licks at her hair. He sits down next to her and starts to absently play with the tendrils of wavy dark hair flicking with the current. If she closes her eyes, she can pretend it's Padma, and then if she thinks as little as possible, a soft feeling builds in her chest.

If she thinks too hard, tears threaten her. But if she doesn't think at all, it's just Padma playing with her hair the night before finals, the library full of soft voices and her scrolls spread across a table, Granger reviewing them across from her. If she doesn't think at all, it's safe, and she is, too.

Something wet and warm goes down the side of her face. She's thinking too hard. It's Tom's hand in her hair. Thank god the evidence is on the side not facing him.

"Let's go swimming," he says. He has a habit of being abrupt and insistent and he climbs to his feet, tugging her with him.

"The water's cold," Marilyn protests. Her words are weightless.

He steps forward and tugs her with. "We're going swimming," he says. There's no froth in the water, no salt. She wishes there were. The Serpentine looks dead to her. Colorless, framed by an equally colorless sky. Her skin, pale, looks like it belongs to a corpse. It's so grey. The world is so grey. Lifeless.

Her foot, still in a scrappy saddle shoe, freezes on contact with the water. It shocks a laugh out of her. "It's so cold!" she cries and he pulls her further in. Her legs go coated in goosebumps, muscles tensing, but it does seem fun now so she leaps forward, splashing up sparks of cold water. She's laughing for the first time in weeks, her body shaking so hard from the cold she can barely breathe. It's been months and for once her heart isn't beating so loudly she can't think. "It's February—god, what's wrong with you?"

He turns in the water, and they're both soaked now, far enough from the island for Mrs. Cole and Amy and Dennis and Abigail and Janet to be tiny specks. Tom's smiling and when he's smiling she can pretend to be Marilyn Riddle, can pretend there was never anything different, that she's his sister and always has been and it's her and him versus the world. When he's smiling she can pretend that, as long as she doesn't think about it too hard.

Tom reaches over and dunks her head underwater. She forgets to think.

Marilyn comes up sputtering, brushing wet hair from her face. "You rat!" she accuses, and splashes him across the face. She backpedals away from his response, arms pushing the water and—

Oh. Oh, there's a drop. She can't touch the dirt anymore.

Her body goes frozen and she forgets that she'll have to swim. Falling underwater is so slow that it feels inevitable and she doesn't realize she should be clawing at the water until she's slipped under and there's a drop and she's sinking and when did her clothes get so heavy when did her limbs get so stiff it's so so cold—

Tom's hand closes around hers and when she opens her eyes she's so saturated with water it must be under her skin and she's in the cave where she watched Dumbledore drink poison. She coughs, water coming out of mouth in tiny splatters and Tom is still holding her hand.

"This is inconvenient," she says and at the same time Tom's shouting:

"You forgot how to _swim?_ "

Marilyn squeezes his hand. He isn't smiling now and it's so hard to pretend, but she will. She's Marilyn Riddle and he's her brother and she loves him. She pulls herself up on shaky legs, peers into the depths of the cave. There aren't inferi in there, now. Still, a terror thrums in her. When she turns to look out, towards the entrance, all she can see is a long, heavy line of black water.

"I don't know how to get out of here," she says faintly. "I cannot swim."

Marilyn Potter could. Marilyn Riddle is only capable of lying and fear. Looking out at the dark water, at the faintly visible darkening sky beyond it, has dread inflates her. This place nearly killed her once. The dead hands clawing at her—the same way the snakes wrap around her when she sleeps. Marilyn Potter survived this.

"We'll get out the way we got in, then," she says and when she looks at him, there's something human and afraid in his eyes. She brings a smile to the surface, forms it just for him. Offers her hand to him. "Don't worry," she says. "It's you and I against the world, remember?"

There is so much she must forget to make it so. But he believes her, and he takes her hand, and accidental magic forms through panic and fear—holding Voldemort's hand fills her with both. She closes her eyes tight, thinks about the dead bodies and the way she can only remember a green light and someone screaming; she thinks about standing alone near the back of the classroom and no one will _talk to her_ and she thinks of the cupboard of the altar room of _am I going to die here_ —

( _maybe she already has—_ )

They make it back to Wool's.


	3. magic

m _a_ gI _ **C**_

The weeks after the cave Tom goes strangely silent and stays that way for months. It isn't isolation from him, isn't that he's ignoring her. But he looks at her in a way she can't calculate and at night he stops trying to inveigle her into sneaking from Wool's. She isn't sure why. They'd both been beaten for it, when they arrived back at Wool's Orphanage with the moon silhouetting them, wet and shaking and probably close to hypothermia. On the walk back, the two of them confused as rats in the streets of London, her fingers had swelled, and when she bent them, it felt like she was tearing the seam of her, getting closer to a rip in the hem. After her turn with the paddle—which was so, so humiliating, but the only witness was Tom, and he got the same treatment—it had taken hours for her hands to feel normal again instead of insistingly numb. But they're punished for things all the time, Tom more often than her. He's never spent more time than normal being angry about it. He's never been angry at her for it, either.

He's never held the air of anger for this long.

It doesn't matter if he seems unbothered, if his hands aren't clenched or his eyes aren't narrowed. She can feel it. It's on her like humidity, hot and sticky against her skin. It's like there's a gun pointed at her head, like she can feel the weight of its barrel pushing into temple. She turns her head a bit to see him. The sunlight drifting over his eyes has the wet dark of them glimmering when it hits. Tom's not looking at her. The quiet sharpness to him grates against her like sandpaper.

Maybe there was something magic about that cave and inside it he could tell what she was thinking, somehow. Maybe he could feel the way she was picturing him with his fingers around her throat; picturing him cutting her open with death eaters all around; picturing him with a hand on her chin, eyes on her like she was a crudely molded sculpture; picturing him killing her parents and the wreckage she had to live in afterwards. Maybe he knew that her fear is only rivaled by her hatred, that the girl who looks at him like he's all she has in her grey world isn't real and neither is she. Maybe he could tell. Maybe the memories were visible in the reflection of her tears. Maybe images were floating through her blurry eyes, playing back like film. Maybe he could see it, could see the ugliness framed in the beauty of her smile.

Maybe. Probably not.

There's something about him that feels deceitful to her, dangerous. It's her who's the problem, though—her who looks at him and sees the monster living behind her eyelids. He's just a boy. It's her who looks at him and lets her mind paint someone else over his face.

But is it?

She watches his face. She's never thought of Voldemort as human. Marilyn never looked at him and saw a soul. At first she saw a nightmare, a myth. Then she saw something real and so much worse. But now he looks the same as her. They're sitting in the courtyard, grass pushing up at her legs, the sun, sweeter now, shimmering down. Privet Drive, on the edge of London, could sometimes be beautiful during the time just between summer and spring. This, here in London with the heat of summer materialized, feels more impressive to her.

Marilyn drinks in the air, pretends it doesn't taste stale. This is all she has.

The heat on her skin makes her uncomfortably drowsy, the sleepiness making a shroud over her against her will. She doesn't want it, doesn't like it, but suffers the sunlight regardless. She wants freckles to sprout over the the plains of her body, over the expanses of paleness. Looking at her skin makes her itch, makes her feel dirty—she wants to peel it off, wants to rub herself raw and get rid of it all.

Tom bumps his shoulder to her, watching her now. She wants to think it's curiosity in those eyes. Marilyn wants to see something in his eyes other than a stretching coldness, wants to see something boiling there, alive. She's never been able to look in his eyes long enough to check. The way his iris look—dark and wet—is too much. She forces herself to look at him, to acknowledge him, but soon has to glance away. "Aren't we going to talk about what we did?"

Marilyn remembers Dumbledore told her Tom did something horrible in that cave.

All Tom did was yell at her.

"Talk about what?"

He scoots closer to her. Tom loves secrets. "What we _did,_ " he impresses upon her again, eyes serious and the implication heavy. She only looks at him. She's too tired—always too tired, too exhausted, everyone is gone and looking at Tom hurts—to even be expectant. Tom loves secrets and he loves talking about himself, especially to her. No one in the orphanage wants to talk to him. No one cares how his day has been or what thoughts are held heavy in the space between discovering them and saying them out loud. There's only Marilyn for that. She watches and feels tired. "How did we get in that cave? And how did we get out?"

"Oh," Marilyn says. She'd expected her voice to come out small, emptied out, but instead she just sounds bored. "That."

Which is real, she wonders? Is the part of her rotting just a corpse of who Marilyn used to be, and the thing inside her, the thing clinging to her heart and pulling at her lungs and twining like vegetation around her, pushing so hard she thinks soon it will break the skin—is the thing inside her, sprouting higher and higher and higher, all that remains? Maybe she isn't vacant, isn't something with the core dug out. Maybe it isn't only that something scooped her insides out. Maybe there's more inside her now, planting roots under her eyes and inside the cage of her ribs.

She'd expected her voice to sound small. Emptied out. She just sounds bored.

Maybe she's just bored.

"Yes! That!" His voice turns into a hissed whisper and he leans even closer to her. Tom loves secrets but the only one he has to share them with is her. She can't manage to match his enthusiasm. The way he looks at her shows he's too far gone to mind. "There was something-something otherworldly about that cave. You felt it, didn't you?" _It's you and I against the world, remember?_ "Wasn't there?" His eyes search her and she realizes he needs her to say it. He needs her to tell him he's special, needs her to be just as amazed and terrified and exhilarated as he is. He has no mother, no father, and he's grown up as nothing. He needs her to tell her he isn't nothing, needs her to be as happy as him about it. They're magical, she thinks, not special. But he needs her to say it. "Don't you see?"

His eyes, his eyes—she looks away. He needs her to say it. A moment passes and it would be so easy to. But he isn't special, so she won't. Another moment and he does it himself. "You're special," he says, speaking like she imagines a fanatic would sound when reading lines from the bible. " _We're_ special." Tom's amazing and awful and looking at her like she's hung starlight in her hair. He's barely an inch away, breath like an itch as it pricks her skin, and she hates him (but Marilyn's never been less sure of anything) so closes her eyes and holds in a sigh.

(The thing inside her swells.)

"Yes," she eventually says. He goes bright at the validation. She feels as though she is decaying, as if all of her has slipped out through her lungs without notice. She wonders what's growing in its place. "Yes. I suppose so. From a certain perspective, someone could say we're special."

It's enough. He laughs—not a real one, not the kind of laugh cute kitten videos achieve. He laughs the way he did when he took over her world, when he gained control of the Ministry, when he finally finally _finally_ destroyed Hogwarts. If Marilyn weren't hollow the noise would've made something inside her break. But she's empty and so only her shell cracks. "I knew it!" he crows, pulling her against him so her face goes on top of his shoulder, nose in the spot where his shirt meets skin, touching his collarbone. "I knew it," he breathes into her hair. "I always knew we were special."

 _Special._

"We aren't special, Tom," she murmurs, and he brings her closer, holds her tighter. "We were never special. We're magic."

It is July 31, but Marilyn Potter is—not dead, as she never existed at all—someone else, far away, so Marilyn Riddle doesn't celebrate. Instead she holds her killer and lets him leave bruises in her shoulder blades from the force of his grip.

…

On their eleventh birthday Tom and Marilyn huddle next to each other on one cot with their blankets wrapped around them. It's snowing in London. Always is, on December 31. But the orphanage is struggling financially. That's an always-is, too. But now there are consequences. Marilyn's body shakes. She can feel Tom shaking, too, from where he's pressed into her side.

He's too cold to even be clinging to her, too cold to wrap his fingers around her arm or bury into her side. He loves to touch her, usually—not in a strange way. It doesn't require any reprimands. He's just alone and never had a mother and sometimes she thinks he forgets she didn't, either. But it's so cold, so dark, wind rushing through the gaps between their barred window and the wall and under their door. His skin is barely even touching hers. In the sunlight he lives for her hand in his. In the dark, with her lips a color only barely above blue, he's trying only to live.

She offers him a pilfered biscuit. Her fingertips are paler than usual—she hadn't known it was possible to go any shade higher. "Happy birthday," she says.

He only shivers. She eats it herself.

…

The months pass. They don't get Hogwarts letters. Instead, they get Albus Dumbledore.

Marilyn forces herself not to fidget from her spot next to Tom, trying to keep her eyes open despite the sun glare. Dumbledore gets himself settled on the cot across from them, his hair darker than she remembers and his eyes lighter. She barely dares to look at them, but he's too close to slip from her peripheral vision. He'd told her that from the moment he met Tom Riddle, he knew there was something rotten clinging behind that skin. Marilyn can't tell if it's true. He looks younger. Somehow, this makes him appear more threatening. He doesn't look gentler from the rewind of time. He looks darker, and scarred, and strong. He isn't the person she remembers.

It's strange to see him. He isn't the man she knew. It makes Marilyn wonder about all of the people she used to know, the people who are neither alive nor dead and yet will never exist to her again; all of the people technically nowhere, alive in memory and dead to her all the same. It makes her think of herself, of Potter, worse than dead, since she might never be real at all.

It hurts to think about.

Tom is on the edge of vibrating beside her, nervousness spilling out of him in small twitches. He starts to reach for her, subtly, but still possessive, like a child grabbing for a baby blanket. It makes a wave of distaste roll over her, but there's no helping it. Behind her back, hidden by how closely seated they are, Marilyn takes Tom's hand. He's so suspicious, Tom. He says too much. She wants Dumbledore to love them, and she avoids the man's eyes partly out of shame and partly from caution. She failed him, before. She hopes she looks merely shy.

It somehow inspires ignominy to imagine lying right to his face. And she does plan to lie—there's no way she can let him know the full story. Not about Tom, and certainly not about her. Tom's a future killer and Marilyn Potter doesn't exist.

"You two must be wondering why I'm here," Dumbledore says, leaning towards them. Marilyn feels like prey, like a corn snake caught on the sand as a hawk flies above. "I represent an institution designed for—"

"We don't need to be institutionalized," Tom snaps, head going up so he can glare fully at their visitor. Marilyn squeezes his hand in warning while Dumbledore's eyebrows rise marginally. Tom ignores both signals in favor of shooting off his mouth. _Typical._ "We don't need any doctors or hospitals and we certainly don't need _you_ to take a _look_ at us. We aren't—aren't _crazy_ , no matter what Mrs. Cole told you, and we haven't done anything—"

"Tom," Marilyn hisses. His hand is stiff, clammy in hers, his back so straight it looks painful.

"It's alright." Dumbledore nods at them, and Marilyn stares resolutely at his beard. "No, Tom, you aren't crazy. But you are special."

"Special," Marilyn echoes. The word tastes rough in her mouth.

They're _special_ , are they?

"Sorry to interrupt you, sir." Marilyn draws herself up, raising her head and straightening her back. She feels like a god readying herself for war, and Dumbledore appraises her the way she would imagine a king would survey conquered territory. "But we aren't special," she says, the words pulling themselves from her chest as though a living thing, crawling free from the depths of her stomach, from the valley of her ribs. She thinks of the snakes hissing in the schoolyard and the fires spawned by her fingertips and the way she can walk on air if she's screaming loud enough. _Special._

"No, we're not," Tom agrees and she can't place his expression. He glances to her. Tom's fingers tighten around her shaky hand. "We're magic." Hearing him say the words—her words—feels too intimate, too close. There's a nervousness to her body; there's something inside her, buzzing just under her skin, demanding to get free.

She wonders if there's something inside Tom, too.

"You're right about that," Dumbledore permits. "You two are definitely magical. I would know. I _am_ a professor at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry."

Tom sucks in a breath, his grip on her tightening. "This isn't funny," he says, voice taut, his hold on her crossing the border to painful. Marilyn keeps her face blank, praying that her joints don't crack. "We aren't stupid—this isn't _funny_ —"

"Tom's right," Marilyn announces, her voice strong even as her hand trembles, even as the delicate bones of her fingers are forced closer together. "What do you think you're saying? You're being incredibly obtuse if you think we are even an _inch_ that idiotic—"

"You can do things, can't you? Things that are different."

Tom opens his mouth, probably to say far too much, when Marilyn says, "So what if we can?"

"You belong at Hogwarts," he implores. "I'm like you, Marilyn. Like you and your brother." He smiles. It's a sad attempt and only reveals his own weariness. She thinks of the Dumbledore she knew and compares the images and finds she hopes she has as little as possible in common with Albus Dumbledore. _I'm like you, Marilyn._

She smiles but it's closer to baring her teeth. _We are nothing alike._

"Hogwarts…" Tom murmurs, his exterior broken by a hint of hope. "A school of magic? And we get to go there? Really?"

Dumbledore told her he knew Tom was rotten from the first moment they met. The words, now, say more about him than Tom. As she watches, her eyes go narrowed and she can't find the energy to make her expression neutral. Dumbledore digs in his teal colored robes for a moment, and eventually produces a wand. The sight of one has her biting her lip on a gasp. "Really," he confirms, and when he waves his wand, sparks fly from the tip of it. A small noise escapes Tom. Marilyn glances to the side, looks at his face.

She has never seen Tom grin. The expression smeared in his eyes now is brighter than any smile could ever be. Looking at it isn't like looking at the sun but like being burned by it and, inevitably, she has to look away. The way he looked right then was too private for her, anyway. No one except someone who adored him should have seen him look like that. She never knew he could look so _happy._

It feels traitorous that she saw it.

She snaps from the thought when Dumbledore goes back within his robes, and two envelopes free themselves from the depths. It turns out they do get Hogwarts letters.

Tom's examining his with one hand, the other still linked with hers, when Dumbledore reveals a secondary point. "There are, of course, rules, at Hogwarts," he says. Marilyn forces herself to nod along. "And certain things are not tolerated."

Marilyn bites her tongue over a yelp when their wardrobe bursts into flame.

 _What is he—_

"Stealing," Dumbledore says, his wand flicking and pulling a metal box from within the burning wood, "will not be tolerated." The box flips, and trinkets tumble loudly to the hardwood. They are all worthless things, and not at all worthy of stealing. They have no use for necklaces with nickle peeking out from chipped silver paint or any reason to have stashed a collection of lightly frayed ribbons of various colors. Abigail's crimes suddenly seem incredibly dramatized. Tom's barely even breathing.

"I see," Marilyn grinds out, voice a hue above a whisper. It is her, now, not Tom, who tightens the grip of their linked hands. "Don't worry, sir. It will not happen again."

Later, she'll be hissing complaints at Tom, angry and embarrassed and even more disgusted. Later, Tom will crumple beneath her berating and reach desperately for her, and she will take great joy in smacking his hand aside. Later, Mrs. Cole will shout at them and Marilyn will leave Tom to take his own beating.

For now, Marilyn smiles, mouth tight, Tom's hand warm in hers. "See you in September, children," Dumbledore says, and that's the end of it.

…

When Marilyn walks through the entrance to the wizarding world, stepping from Tom the Bartender's dirty floor to the dusty cobblestone of Diagon Alley, it's like the world is finally in color.

Magic washes over her like rain, sunlight warm on her face. The wizarding world is even more beautiful after her prolonged absence to it, and she wants to spread her arms wide and dance in the street. Pops of magic burst from various shops down the block, and Marilyn can feel the wind on her cheeks like a touch. The sun spills in honey over the buildings and the grass is green instead of deadened yellow and everything is sparking like fireworks, shining like stars.

It's beautiful. She'd missed it.

(She'd missed it and it's beautiful but something isn't the same. She can remember walking down these streets with Hagrid, her clothes hanging off her like wet laundry on a drying rack, and everything was so so beautiful then. She breathed in the air, and even if maybe it was the same oxygen as outside, after she walked into Leaky Cauldron, everything had suddenly been fresher. It was as if she'd been drugged for years and the haze had finally lifted free. Like she'd been wearing sunglasses so long she'd forgotten them until someone tugged them from her face.

No, it's beautiful. It's magic, and there's something about that—something about it that means coming home for Marilyn. A piece of her lives and breathes only in the world of wizards and in these streets it comes back to life.

No, it's beautiful. Magic is her family. She loves it. It's the first time in more than a year that she's been allowed to see it.

No. It's beautiful. But it isn't special anymore.)

Tom tugs on her shirtsleeve. It's a pull back to reality, and she glances down at their school supply list. School supplies feel too mundane for such a glowing place. Marilyn trails behind him, letting him lead her through the street while her eyes spin from one thing to the next. It's 1938, but Wizarding Britain is still beautiful. It's shiny and bright and freshly dusted and she'd missed it.

"It's beautiful," she breathes, the words silk on her tongue, satin and stains. This is the world she's meant for. She and it are kin. "It's so beautiful."

Tom glances at her over his shoulder. Then, dismissively, "It's just a couple of shops."

("We were never special. We're magic.")

She chokes.

He doesn't get it. It's strange to think that Voldemort was ever muggle, was ever immune to the charms of magic, but he suddenly seems distinctly out of place. It's as though someone has snuck into this world of starlight and brought with them the sheen of dark obsidian. It feels, abruptly, like Tom doesn't belong here. She thinks of the way Tom looked at her when he was telling her about the cave and she can't understand why he isn't looking at the brick the same way.

It's strange and uncomfortable, as he definitely doesn't belong in the orphanage, doesn't belong with muggles. But if not here, and if not there, then what would possibly fit him? How could Voldemort have waged a war, perpetuated genocide, for a world painted in colors he can barely see?

Marilyn finds the information unsettling, and she snaps, "It is _not_ just a load of shops, Tom," at the back of his head. In response, he tightens his hand in hers, turning resolutely around the street corner and somehow managing to make even Wizarding Britain unpleasant. She wonders what the people around them think of her muggle skirt and his muggle slacks. When she'd first walked these streets, sixty or so years in the future and so long ago, it had seemed like the people there were all in custom. Now she's the one who feels she's playing pretend.

Marilyn frowns at Tom's back and follows him through the streets.

(Later, when she has her wand again, she stares at it in the dark of their room. The air's warmer than their birthday will be, but still a shiver persists along the edges of her spine. Eleven inches long, made of holly, with a phoenix feather as its core. The wood is smooth in her fingers. She's laying on her back and swishing glowy sparks through the air, lighting the room just enough to see Tom's face, to see the way he's looking at his own wand in the light she's producing. The act of it feels like it should be comforting, and maybe it would have been, if she were alone. But as she twirls this wand—her ally in the wizarding world when she was young and alone and she would swirl sparkles into the air when the pit in her stomach felt especially heavy and cold—she finds she feels so little. All of this that used to be special to her—it feels only like the normal she had missed. What used to be something incredible, something she was lucky to live each day… It is now only a regular world she once lived in. She watches as her wand slowly swirls out spirals and figure eights. This used to comfort her. But Tom sometimes turns to watch, too, eyes wide, clutching his own wand—thirteen and a half inches, Yew, phoenix feather core—as a lifeline. Their wands are siblings. They're beautiful.

But they aren't special to her now. Not anymore.)


End file.
